Ravel: Songs: Finley/Drake

Art songs can be among the most self-revealing works in any composer's output, so it's not surprising that Ravel, among the most private of men, wrote few of them. Those we do have show him to be something of a chameleon and a bit of a borrower, containing and hiding his emotions within folk-songarrangements, behind the formal ambiguities of 17th-century poetry or beneath the anthropomorphic fables of Histoires Naturelles. Gerald Finley and Julius Drake's survey gathers all his major songs together. It's a beautiful disc that startles in ways you don't always expect. Though Ravel is often non-specific about the genders of his singers, much of this material has become the province of mezzos, so it might take you a while to acclimatise yourself to Finley's dark, warm baritone in this music. Only the Kaddish from the Deux Mélodies Hébraïques sounds awkward sung by a man, however exquisitely Finley shapes it. Elsewhere, the poetic restraint of his singing and Drake's playing is spellbinding. The settings of Marot and Ronsard are ravishingly done, and the mixture of irony and sadness they bring to Histoires Naturelles is exceptional.